What is - Coaching?
Coaching is a craft and a skill. Coaching has become extremely popular in the last two decades, and more and more people are looking for coaches.
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Coaching is a partnership that happens between the client and coach. This partnership’s aims to create ideas and outcomes to maximize the clients professional and personal potential.
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We all have goals we want to achieve, or situations we want to overcome, or challenges we face, all these sometimes make us feel stuck. This is where a coach steps in, meets the client where they are and bridges the gap of where they want to be.
Coaching is not therapy, therapy is clinical, it aims at helping a disease or disorder. Therapists say Why? While coaches say What next? Therapists give advice while coaches rarely do not. Coaching does not dwell on the past, but stays focused on the present, to create the future a client wants. Coaches are not consultants, teachers, or advisers. Coaches are trained to make questions that open up the client’s awareness to see their own potential. Coaching is future oriented, solution focused oriented. Clients who seek coaching know what they want or what they should do, but something holds them back, a coach has the right questions to help them release the rope that holds them back.
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Coaches believe that the client has within him all that he needs, and by making the right questions, clients find the right solutions within themselves and within their possibilities. Coaches, also, make clients accountable for the steps and actions they have chosen to do. Said in a simple way, a coach is a motivator, he sees the client’s potential, opens the door for the client to also see it, and then the coach makes sure that the client does the work needed to get to the goal he wants.
The beginning of coaching started out as executive coaching and from there it became a professional field with its own governing body. The ICF (International Coaching Federation) have dedicated themselves in making sure that coaches and the institutions that train them, are well-equipped to do their jobs. The standards of ICF are high, and the institutions that are accredited by them pass a vigorous scrutiny of their programs. Even though coaching is an unregulated profession, and many people can call themselves coaches, the ICF for the past 25 years has worked on establishing core competencies and codes of ethics to make coaches around the world have standards when performing their jobs. The institutions that are accredited by them, have the costliest programs and more training hours.
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Coaching is really for everyone, and this industry today has grown into several branches, from executive coaching to wellness/health coaching, life coaching, spiritual coaching, positive psychology coaching, and many others. Some coaches specialize in one of these, others are a mix of all. There are coaches for all areas of life.